Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

December 08, 2010

I'm sure that it comes as absolutely no surprise to any diplomat nor their employing government, that their counterparts from other nations routinely lie to them about pretty much everything. Nor should it come as a shock that some of their counterparts think of them as idiots or worse.

A diplomat is someone who lies professionally for his country and any diplomat not fully aware of that is a liability and should be fired forthwith.

So it is unlikely that the Wikileaks data dump provides anything more than confirmation of normal suspicions and, being diplomats, these people will have no trouble whatever continuing both to deal with, and lie to, each other with unruffled feathers for many years to come, their personal flutterings soothed by regular application of canapes and booze.

On the other hand, what the leaks can very much damage is the credibility and safety of governments at the hands of their employers, viz, us.

While most of us have a default position that our masters, elected and otherwise, treat us and our aspirations and needs with dismissal when it is not outright contempt, it is another thing altogether to discover how regularly and egregiously they betray our interests in the pursuit of their rarefied and esoteric goals in the Great Game.

Wikileaks has the mission of fleshing out and adding fine detail to those betrayals and in doing so they undermine the pretenses and obfuscations and credibility, the authority of nation states in relation to their own people.

THAT is why the bastards are screaming in moral panic; that is why they are plotting the destruction of the torchlight shone straight into their corrupted hearts.

That is why we all have a duty to support Wikileaks, because it has the potential, at last, and in fact, to keep the bastards honest.

Update: What is the betting that, if sweden is able to have Julian Assange extradited, the rape case will be dropped but he will be held because there is an application from the US for his extradition to their jurisdiction? I'm going with about 80%.

Plus, after spending so many uyears in a very happy association with sweden and its reputation for openness, I'm bloody horrified by their role in this.

Al kicks off with a very funny story about a train journey and an iPod that I won't spoil by summarising. And goes into a passionate diatribe against the limits of linear thinking.

Its not just the lack of linearity that we need to accept, its the lack of sequence. Also not wanting to screw up the joke.

But we almost never learn anything in a stepwise, linear fashion. We grab bits of it passing by, and fiddle with our understanding of them, and sometimes for a long time we "just don't get it" because even when we have all the bits they are like a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, the picture is there but we can't 'see" it.

And some people never do. Especially, paradoxically, those who are best at stuff like computer programming where sequence and excruciating detail is critical. Then one day, apparently without any relevant input, we "get" it.

And I suspect that is where, god help me, real innovation occurs. Someone has most of the bits, but can't make them fit so they create a bit, a new bit that didn't exist before but which connects the thing in an entirely different way

And because the world is NOT a jigsaw puzzle, what happens is that the new bit makes all the old bits fit together in different ways as well. Which is why change can be so disorienting.

We recognise that many of the old bits are there but they are somehow distorted in ways we don't understand. So the response of those who were comfortable with the old ways things worked try to pretend that the old bits still work in the old ways, that its just their perception that is wonky; because to accept that the whole world is wonky is just too much of a challenge.

We are, in effect, betrayed by the proximity to familiarity that wouldn't happen if we, say, suddenly moved to Tanzania and had to learn Swahili to survive. When we shift our entire domain we recognise its foreignness, but when that shift happens around us it takes time to adjust to that suspiciously familiar but actually completely different reality.

That seems to me the problem with peak Oil, with Climate change, with the end of western financial capitalism, it all still LOOKS the same, or closely enough to fool us into believing that we don't have to change anything to deal with the problem.

Wrong.

And one more point about non-linearity, it entails outputs that are grossly inconsistent with the inputs and apparently disconnected from them.

Johnnie brings up what I think is a riff on the whole powerpoint ranger syndrome and that is Diagrams. He says:

Visual explanations can be extremely useful and effective. The famous London Underground map is a great example, though recent versions do seem to be getting more cluttered.

But a huge number of diagrams make use of shape and colour in ways that seem gratuitous. Visuals are powerful and when used clumsily seem to screw up the signal-to-noise ratio. I have a suspicion that this sometimes intentional: you can take a fairly simple idea and make is seem more important by turning into a diagram.

For example, you often get a simple idea like "there are five aspects to this" that mysteriously becomes a brightly coloured pentagram. The big shape adds nothing relevant to the idea but introduces to my mind all sort of superfluous ideas about space and boundaries.

I agree, essentially meaningless, for a start, Governance is a dynamic among a number of actors, that they relate to each other in some way (the diagram domain) is a given, what matters is how that relationship functions.

And dynamics are much harder to show visually. I've been trying to design one recently for a programme we call E-engage Your community. Its about enabling NFP's to make better use of ICTs.

My task at the moment is to show how organisations all round the country would be able to use a website to manage their own EYC events, from finding and recruiting workshop presenters to creating a programme of events, accepting bookings and handling payments and have all that feed into a budget spreadsheet.

The idea is that we set up a site and when you create your event we clone the tools on the site for you and you can get on with the event management, promotion etc and the mechanics of the rest of the thing are handled by the website.

In the process it needs to embody the various parts of the organisation at a national level supporting the process

Here's the latest draft. If you can do a better job, don't hesitate.

Ideally it also enables me to tag various parts of it and say to a sponsor, "this is what you are paying for and this is how it fits into the process".

Its not clear, bold and simple, you need to follow the arrows to make sense of it. Guess what, life is complicated.

Another kvetch with "frameworks". Not impressed.

A colleague sent me one the other day on a Digital Communities Framework set up by local government organisation in NZ. Here's what I sent back.

I'm interested in the document but to be blunt, it will achieve nothing. It is mostly a restatement of the "we'll fill the air with regulation and platitude and someone else will do the real work" model that has been around forever.

It is practically verbatim the same document that almost every governmental organisation has produced for as long as I have been doing this stuff and it never goes anywhere.

Just once I would like to see an action plan that uses the leverage of local government being the biggest purchaser of goods and services in a region and says, as did WalMart in the US and the Insurance companies here, "if you want to sell to us, you do it online". it would almost certainly entail all the regional authorities either agreeing on a "framework" themselves, a common data structure and terminology for their activities and transactions (does that already exist BTW?) or providing middleware to map their local version to the agreed structure.

Then it would require that they all sign up to use the same platform to make it affordable and then probably buying something OS off the shelf from Mexico or India that would do pretty much everything they require and getting on with it.

Instead we get endless anodyne documents full of pious hopes and no action.

August 11, 2009

A few years ago the British Government discovered that people who had tried their eGov websites were beginning to migrate back to the phone. My take was that the problem with most websites is that the user is the person least qualified to use them. We are ignorant bunnies when we are looking for critical information from anyone, that's why we need the help in the first place.

At least the phone centre (when I finally get through to them) can start by asking me what the problem is. If i fail to explain something clearly enough they can ask a follow-up question to get the story right, then they can give me the answers I need. At lest there is one expert in the conversation.

A report to be released Tuesday by Forrester Research has found that far from embracing the do-it-yourself era, many Americans are "fed up" with the complicated process of planning and booking travel.

"What we've seen is growing frustration," said Henry H. Harteveldt, a Forrester travel analyst. "Consumers see other Web sites becoming easier to use -- retail Web sites, banking Web sites, media Web sites. But travel is treading water as a category."

"There are very few travel companies that are really looking to improve the planning and booking process," he added.

Customers are required to educate themselves about destinations, flights and hotels; figure out extra fees; wade through fine print; and understand industry jargon like the difference between deluxe and standard rooms, Mr. Harteveldt said.

"Travel companies expect the consumer to behave like a travel agent," he said. "The question I always ask these guys is, 'Could your mother-in-law use your Web site without having to call you for help?' The answer is always no."

In fact, Mr. Harteveldt said, a growing number of consumers appear to be interested in using traditional travel agencies, if they can find one.

I've never used travel sites unless the request is "get me the cheapest flight to X and return, starting on this day and returning on this day at about these times".

For everything else i go to a travel agent.

The airlines got into this game to increase their profits by outsourcing the booking to the customers not the agencies who, bizarrely, wanted a commission for doing the work.

By being unable to simplify anything but the simplest booking, they are shooting their business model in the foot. It may well be that the cost and complexity of being able to simplify the process enough for you and me is just too high and there is too much of their process not under their control; other airlines' policies, government regulations especially. But all that means is that the profitability of an industry already under serious threat, is further compromised.

For the rest of us it means that we need to understand what really happens in our own processes and to look hard at how they actually interconnect. We also need to remember that when it comes to complexity, Reeds law applies.

Every time we add a factor, the number of possible interactions within our system doubles - and the cost of creating a flawless system to manage all those possible combinations squares.

And, sadly for the accountants, the only system that can deal with all that complexity will turn out to be people.

July 03, 2009

It spiders a whole bunch of sources, including online jnews for health-related stories and tries to locate them on the map. You can filter by disease type, country, province or state, Human development index, population, GDP and report age.

Now it also picks up some false positives like an NZ report on global swine flu numbers and locates them in NZ, but it also lets me know within an hour of the report that NSW has reported its first swine flu death.

June 22, 2009

On a trip to Washington D.C., Jonas spoke with a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst at a governmental agency. "What do you wish you could have if you could have anything?" Jonas asked her. Answers to my questions faster, she said. "It sounds reasonable," Jonas told the audience, "but then I realized it was insane." Insane, because "What if the question was not a smart question today, but it's a smart question on Thursday?" Jonas says.

The point is, we cannot assume that data needed to answer the query existed and been recorded before the query was asked. In other words, it's a timing problem. "I said, 'What are the chances you could have every smart question, every day?'"

[...] Jonas related an example of a financial scam at a bank. An outside perpetrator is arrested, but investigators suspect he may have been working with somebody inside the bank. Six months later, one of the employees changes their home address in payroll system to the same address as in the case. How would they know that occurred, Jonas asked. "They wouldn't know. There's not a company out there that would have known, unless they're playing the game of data finds data and the relevance finds the user."

This led Jonas to expound his first principle. "If you do not treat new data in your enterprise as part of a question, you will never know the patterns, unless someone asks."

[...] Getting smarter by asking questions with every new piece of data is the same as putting a picture puzzle together, Jonas said. This is something that Jonas calls persistent context. "You find one piece that's simply blades of grass, but this is the piece that connects the windmill scene to the alligator scene," he says. "Without this one piece that you asked about, you'd have no way of knowing these two scenes are connected."

[...] But large numbers can also work against you. At another federal agency (he wouldn't say which), Jonas got to thinking: What if they had a very large data warehouse in the basement with 4 exabytes (EB) of data, and it was expanding at the rate of 5 TB per minute. "You sit there and you realize you don't get to Friday night and run a batch job to answer the question of what does it all mean," he says. "You could use all the computing power and energy on Earth and you wouldn't be able to do it." The "it" he is referring to, of course, is seeing how each new piece of data affects all the other pieces of data.

"What's happening is data volumes are growing at this pace, yet an organization's ability to make sense of them isn't keeping up," Jonas said. "Today, say you can make sense of 7 percent of what's available, and in a few years it might be 4 percent, and in a few years after that it might be one percent. So the percentage of what's knowable is on the decline."

[...] "I think the only way forward is going from applying algorithms to individual transactions, to first placing information in context--pixels to pictures--and only applying algorithms after one sees how the transaction relates to the other data," he said. "It's the only way that I can see that it's going to close this sense-making gap."

I can see three problems here at least that Jeff can't solve and which continues to give me hope that Big Brother will drown in his own data.

The counter terrosim expert problem is not that she can't get her questions answered, nor that, as he asserts, she needs to know what questions to ask and when to ask them. Her problem is that even when she has the right answers to the right questions, they wont be actioned unless they help with “fixing” the data around the policy

His approach essentially requires that the organisation and its management continuously reconstruct their view of reality and constantly work without a context into which to fit the data because, by definition, the next bit of data could collapse and reconstruct that picture as something completely new. The level of self confidence that would take for people whose lives depend on structure, order, process, CYA best practise and, above all, control, is wholly at odds with the kind of people you recruit to fill those roles. Oh, and

You still can't know everything. The data you have can only tell you so much, but the data you are not collecting is what will kill you.

Jeff is, no doubt, a seriously smart guy, but he is also a technologist who believes in the perfectability of human society through technology. But while we are driven by greed, fear, ambition, hatred and pride, fixing our ignorance wont change anything.

... my son Allen came up with the “Live Web” line way back in 2003, and correctly observed that the Web of sites was essentially a static one, and that the World Live Web would branch off of it.

The language alone is a give-away. The Static Web is full of real estate language: sites, domains and locations that you architect, design and build. While the Live Web is one with feeds where you write, post, update, syndicate and now also tweet and re-tweet. To me the differences between static and live are much clearer than those between ______ (find a word) and real time.

Here's a word, history. Ossified, fixed, outdated are pretty good too.

But I love the idea of the World Live Web which, I think we'll see, is a function of bandwidth. In dialup days web p[ages needed to be relatively fixed because the constant chatter between server and client would be too much for the bandwidth to manage.

Grow that bandwidth and suddenly the conversation becomes possible and whenever we can converse, we will.

June 06, 2009

My colleague Shelby Wright (not her real name) just unloaded this email on me in response to Time magazine putting twitter on its front page.

I get it but ... I don't get it ... ie Twitter . This has made me deeply unpopular in certain digitally inclined circles

My first line of defence for being openly cynical of Twitter is to hide behind William Blake
" The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook "

The point here is

I have NO interest in knowing if someone is picking their nose with their left or right hand and what they had for breakfast

Moving on

I have some very fundamental concerns if the sum total of peoples relationship with the world around them is solely governed by 140 characters or less - whether it be twitter or text messaging

And Shelby is not alone in decrying the triviality and mind-numbing insignificance of a lot of Twitter content. I wont even argue that the people I follow such as Tim O'Reilly or Euan Semple or OCR Report etc are useful, informative and mercifully brief in their pointers to good material. Its irrelevant because its the wrong question.

What we need to be asking is "what about Twitter and txt is so very attractive to us about these tools?" They fail entirely in the multimedia, all singing all dancing broadband world of opportunity yet they take off like rockets.

I have a theory about why this is so, my wife Linda who is a speech/language pathology lecturer and linguistics specialist has a theory about why so many people like us (excessively verbal opinionated extroverts with huge vocabularies and masses of information to backup those opinions) are so inclined to get pissed off by trivial stuff like txt and Twitter.

Mine first.

These tools match perfectly the way we acquire and share information.

Outside the prolixity of bloggers there is a universe of human utterance that is short, inconsequential and completely essential to maintianing relationships and sharing crucial information about status, leadership, consensus etc. I'd give good odds that the average length of these utterances is 140 characters.

But this is nothing new. For a generation we have been listening to news headline bulletins that are effectively Tweets to us from the world. The BC does its World News in a minute bulletin many times a day. Here's one

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
has said he will not walk away from his job, he responded to mounting
pressure on him by bringing forward a reshuffle of his top team. 174
characters

At the same time there have been more
high profile resignations from Mr Brown's government, among them was
the transport secretary Geoff Hoon. Five cabinet ministers have quit
this week with one publicly calling for he prime minister to step
down. 247 characters

President Obama has visited the former
Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald during his visit to Germany. The
US president described the camp as the ultimate rebuke to the people
who would deny the holocaust. He said such views were baseless
ignorant and hateful. 260 characters

At least 35 people have been killed in
a suicide attack on a packed mosque in the north west of Pakistan.
Many others were injured. It happened in a remote village in the
upper Dir district 190 characters

Take out the necessary glosses like "The British Prime Minister " and "The US president" and you see what I mean.

Then there are elevator pitches, comedian's one-liners, wisecracks, repartee, gossip (OK, maybe not that one) rumours, an endless supply of short, pithy material slipped off the tongue and into the brain with speed economy and great effect.

These information tokens are vitally important to us and when we find new ways to exchange them we dive in boots and all. Hence the usually unexpected success of Twitter, txt, even email. We can object all we like but when something works we are fools to reject it.

Now Linda's theory about why some people get so seriously uppity about this stuff.

Its about status and communication modes. We have been taught, especially the oldies, that there is a palpable difference between spoken and written communication.

There's a formal and structural difference, a difference of context, intent, the whole shebang. And for those of us who are good at both, the ability to switch is a matter of pride but its also a shibboleth; a matter of distinction and pride. And its entirely artificial.

We are now using, in a very public sphere, language forms that have been
much more intimate and others are responding in kind. That is feeding
acceptance and attracting more users and so we go exponential;
because it satisfies important emotional and communication needs that
are encoded into the dna.

What this technolgy is doing is breaking down the distinctions which can also be sources of power, and those of us who benefited from the previous status quo get antsy about it.

Perfect example. Linda talks about how she is a descriptive linguist, interested only in the evolution of language and how it manages relationships, conveys meaning, yadda yadda. Right up till something someone says gets right up her grammatical or semantic nose, at which time she becomes a prescriptive linguist and is due for a serve from the husband about hypocrisy, inconsistency, more yadda yadda. To which the reply is usually along the lines of "tough, get used to it"

On the seriously plus side, I think tools like txt and twitter are possibly enabling us to use the same kinds of communication that have helped bind us into couples, families and communities over very short ranges, ie intimate voice distances, to apply those capabilities over much wider ranges. The ability to bind over great swathes of the world may very well undermine hyperlocal tribalism just as Chelsea fans have to cope with "their" team being made up of 22 players from 18 countries speaking 4 languages and cheering them on anyway.

June 03, 2009

There is exactly zero reason for the expenses of our parliamentary representatives not to be detailed and publicly available. It is our money they are spending and I have a right to know how they are using it and to be able to see who is spending what on what. At last MPs face public eye on expense accounts

MPs' expense accounts are likely to be opened to public scrutiny after a face-saving move by Prime Minister John Key led to an urgent cross-party meeting being called.

Party representatives will meet this week to discuss ways of giving more details on how MPs use their $14,800 expense accounts and accommodation and travel allowances.

The expenses are not detailed, and are not subject to the Official Information Act like other Government departments.

Both major parties had resisted changes until Mr Key called for the meeting yesterday.

When the question of MPs' expenses was raised three weeks ago, Mr Key said it was a matter for Speaker Lockwood Smith.

Dr Smith has also been reluctant to move to greater transparency, saying MPs "are under enough scrutiny as it is".

But he quickly heeded Mr Key's call yesterday, saying he would convene the meeting "as soon as practicable", probably this week.

The turnaround came after the Green Party promised to disclose its MPs' expenses spending each year. Act and the Maori Party followed suit.

The focus on expenses follows the furore in Britain after expenses claimed by House of Commons MPs were exposed as covering items including moat cleaning and duck houses.

Mr Key said the fallout from the British scandal could not be ignored.

"We can't sit back and be blind to the fact that what happened in the United Kingdom has increased pressure from voters around the world for a higher level of transparency."

The technology exists for this to be a trivial matter. They should claim their expenses electronically and provide physical receipts, the expense account data should be an RSS feed that i can add to my reader. Simple.

And don't give me anything about prying into their private lives. When I travel to Wellington once a month for a Trust meeting, I claim for a dinner with my sister in law with whom I stay, in lieu of paying for a hotel and with the blessing of the trustees. But I don't claim for dinner with my daughter. I can buy coffee for someone I am meeting on Trust business, but I can't claim for coffee with someone with whom I am doing other business. Its not that hard, I'm sure our MP's can figure it out.